Chary, I was being deliberately ridiculous with the title there.  It just struck me when I read the article that humans have been steadily getting larger, taller etc. over the course of the centuries of recorded history along with population exploding…..in my ‘tooned’ mind I saw us growing ‘out of’ our planet. 

I remember going to Greenfield Village several times as a very young child.  (pulled up the link and it’s nothing like it was All the WAY back then:  http://www.thehenryford.org/village/historicdistricts.aspx ).  They had a huge museum where they had put an actual village market place.  The shops were so very small and even I realized that all adults (who were not as tall in the 1950s even as today) had to really duck to get in the doorways!  The ceilings would not accommodate a man at 6 feet either and there was really no room to barely turn about.  In fact, even when going into the historic homes that had been moved from their original locations to the ‘village’, it was very easy to realize how much smaller people were just 200 years ago. 

Over the course of my life, I have seen people growing larger and taller and the increasing scale appears to be typical and not just the oddity.  I’ve also noticed that birth weight and length of infants is also expanding but so is the gestation period extending into 10 months in many cases. 

Why are we getting taller as a species?  June 29, 1998 (Scientific American)

Anyone who has ever visited a home built around the time of the Revolutionary War along the back alleys of Philadelphia or Boston has been struck, metaphorically if not literally, by the characteristically low ceilings and small door frames. Even houses built in the early 1800s can make a person of average height by today’s standards wonder how the orignal occupants managed to stay conscious long enough to participate in an industrial revolution and a civil war.

For most people, contemporary buildings do not prompt similar claustrophobic concerns. The reason for this difference, as many people have correctly guessed, is that modern humans are taller than those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, over the last 150 years the average height of people in industrialized nations has increased approximately 10 centimeters (about four inches).

So my ‘tooned’ vision of the Earth tilting…....?  Well, I don’t know!

Well, the weight of the people may not effect things, but what about the MASSIVE build up of ice around the south pole combined with the moderate thinning of ice at the North Pole? (Though to be fair, the Arctic Ocean/Northwest Passage was almost or completely clear around the 1910’s-20’s, so one would assume that such a buildup occurred then as well.)  Could such an imbalance produce any ‘wobble’ or change in the Earth’s rotation.

(This is something I have seen brought up occasionally on the edges of the web from time to time…)

Except that ice weighs slightly less than water. If it melts, you just have the same amount of weight. No change except it’s less lumpy.

Even that is insignifigant. Every ocean on the planet? Insignifigant.

Here’s an idea of the scale we are talking about: If you took the earth, and shrunk it down to the size of a billiard ball, it would be *smoother* than the billiard ball. Every mountain, every ocean, everything we see is a thin, tiny skin on the planet. You might as well say a book would weigh less if they didn’t use any capital letters.